Good Afternoon all,
Sorry this is late, I was ill this morning. I don't think the spaghetti I had last night agreed with me...or, maybe it's just the pregnant thing. Anyway, today's posts center around evirnomental issues. For instance, Dell, the computer producer has gotten their global headquarters to go 100 percent green for electric consumption. In another article, Scottland states that it can power the whole of UK on green fuels from Scottland.
Anyway, I still don't feel well, but I hope that you all enjoy these posts. :) I'll see you tomorrow.
Today's Top 5:
1. Dell Global Headquarters Campus Going 100 Percent Green (Earth Times)
2.Germany Helping Naples Dispose of Surplus Garbage (Earth Times)
3. Paper or Plastic? Either Bag Would Cost You 20 Cents Extra Under Nickels' Plan (Seattle Times)
4. Green Scotland 'can power whole of UK' (The Scottsman)
5. Music File Compressed 1,000 Times Smaller Than Mp3 (Science Daily)
Honorable Mention:
1. 5th - Grader Finds Mistake at Smithsonian (NY Times)
Top 5:
1. Dell Global Headquarters Campus Going 100 Percent Green
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/dell-global-headquarters-campus-going-100-percent-green,336996.shtml
Posted : Wed, 02 Apr 2008 15:50:40 GMT
Author : TX-DELL
Category : Press Release
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ROUND ROCK, Texas - (Business Wire) Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) is now powering 100 percent of its 2.1 million square-foot global headquarters campus, home to more than 10,000 employees, with 100 percent green power, the latest step in meeting the company’s 2008 carbon neutral commitment.
“It’s time for our industry to take a lead role in creating a clean energy future,” said Paul Bell, president, Dell Americas. “Today, we are challenging every technology company to work with their suppliers and partners in integrating green power and energy-efficient strategies into their operations.”
“Powering an entire campus with green power, in partnership with these two leading companies, is an important step in becoming the greenest technology company on the planet and the right thing to do for our shared earth,” said Mr. Bell. “At the same time we’re using green technology to drive operating expense down.”
Dell is using all of the power generated from Waste Management’s Austin Community Landfill gas-to-energy plant, meeting 40 percent of Dell headquarters’ campus power needs. The remaining 60 percent comes from existing wind farms and is provided by TXU Energy.
Dell also announced today it is increasing green power use for its Austin Parmer Campus, provided by Austin Energy, from eight to 17 percent. The company is a leading participant in Austin Energy’s GreenChoice® power program. Dell also is powering its Twin Falls, Idaho, facility with 100 percent green power, 97 percent of which is wind power and three percent solar.
In September 2007, Dell announced it would make company owned and leased facilities “carbon neutral” in 2008 through a strategy of improving energy-efficiency in its operations and maximizing the purchase of renewable power. This commitment is part of the company’s climate strategy which also seeks to minimize carbon impact of supplier operations and customer product use.
Operational initiatives to increase efficiency and reduce electricity use already implemented on Dell’s central Texas campuses are expected to save the company nearly $2 million annually in operating costs and cutting CO2 equivalent emissions by nearly 12,000 tons per year. The purchase of green power gives Dell price certainty on its operational costs for power, and the company expects it may see cost benefits to using green power in the future.
Dell’s green technology solutions include the OptiPlex 755 and Inspiron 531 desktops, Latitude D630 laptop, PowerEdge M-Series blades and PowerEdge Energy Smart servers. The company’s desktop systems alone have helped customers save more than $2.2 billion and avoid approximately 22.4 million tons of CO2.
“We’re very pleased that our Austin Community Landfill’s gas to energy project will play a key role in Dell’s commitment to using renewable energy. This project is part of our company’s environmental initiative to increase the production of waste based energy. Today, we create enough energy for the equivalent of 1 million homes each year and by 2020 we expect to double that output, producing enough energy for the equivalent of more than 2 million homes,” said David Steiner, chief executive officer of Waste Management, Inc.
“This is yet another example of TXU Energy’s commitment to offering renewable power choices that are good for business and the environment,” said Jim Burke, chief executive officer for TXU Energy “TXU Energy is dedicated to improving our use of renewable power and encouraging greater energy efficiency, both of which help preserve our environment.”
“For Dell to partner with Waste Management and TXU to source renewable energy on this scale is great news,” said Steve Howard, CEO of The Climate Group. “Greening the company’s Texas operations not only underpins Dell’s bold carbon neutral commitment but helps drive clean energy investment and tackles climate change.”
About Dell
Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) listens to customers and delivers innovative technology and services they trust and value. Uniquely enabled by its direct business model, Dell is a leading global systems and services company and No. 34 on the Fortune 500. For more information, visit www.dell.com, or to communicate directly with Dell via a variety of online channels, go to www.dell.com/conversations. To get Dell news direct, visit www.dell.com/RSS.
About Waste Management
Waste Management, based in Houston, Texas, is the leading provider of comprehensive waste management services in North America. Our subsidiaries provide collection, transfer, recycling and resource recovery, and disposal services. We are also a leading developer, operator and owner of waste-to-energy and landfill gas-to-energy facilities in the United States. Our customers include residential, commercial, industrial, and municipal customers throughout North America. More information about how Waste Management Thinks Green® can be found at www.wm.com/wm/thinkgreen.
About TXU Energy
TXU Energy, a subsidiary of Energy Future Holdings Corp., is a market-leading competitive retailer that provides electricity and related services to more than 2.1 million electricity customers in Texas. TXU Energy offers a variety of innovative products and solutions, allowing both its residential and business customers to choose options that best meet their needs, including 24/7 customer service, competitively priced electricity service plans, innovative energy efficiency options, renewable energy programs and other electricity-related products and services. Energy Future Holdings Corp., formerly named TXU Corp., is a Dallas-based energy holding company with a portfolio of competitive and regulated energy subsidiaries, primarily in Texas, including TXU Energy, Luminant and Oncor. Visit www.txuenergy.com for more information about TXU Energy.
About The Climate Group
The Climate Group (www.theclimategroup.org) is an independent, nonprofit organization that works with government and business leaders to accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy. Its coalition of proactive leaders – from government, business and NGOs – has demonstrated that the emissions reductions needed to stop climate change can be achieved while boosting profitability and competitiveness. Companies, states, regions and cities around the world are realizing there are significant economic as well as environmental advantages of taking decisive action now. The Climate Group was founded in 2004 and has offices in the UK, US, China, India and Australia.
Note: Electronic media kit available at www.dell.com/greenpowernews
If you are interested in contacting Dell, please see the earth times website noted above.
2. Germany Helping Naples Dispose of Surplus Garbage
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/196144,germany-helping-naples-dispose-of-surplus-garbage.html
Posted : Wed, 02 Apr 2008 09:00:01 GMT
Author : DPA
Category : Environment
Frankfurt - Germany is the only country that has agreed to help Italy dispose of up to 160,000 tons of garbage from the Naples area, the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung said Wednesday. The newspaper said the environment ministers of Germany's federal states had reached a deal with the Italian government through the special commissioner in charge of rubbish removal operations.
Some 60,000 tons of the waste to be disposed will be collected from the streets and a remaining 100,000 tons will come from daily household and industrial rubbish, the newspaper said.
The bulk of the garbage will be incinerated in the northern port city of Hamburg, which has initially agreed to take 30,000 tons, and North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany's most populous state, which will handle 54,000 tons.
Stadtreinigung Hamburg (SRH), a commercial arm of the state government which disposes of the city's waste, is charging 150 euros (235 dollars) per ton.
Including transport, the cost of the disposal could add up to 200-230 euros per ton, the newspaper added, giving the deal a total volume of 37 million euros.
A spokesman for the environmental ministry in Berlin told the newspaper that Germany was the only country in the European Union with sufficient capacity to dispose of the Italian waste.
He said the operation would be of a limited duration because Germany was acting to help Italy overcome an emergency.
"It will not turn into a permanent situation where Italy can dispose of its waste in Germany," the spokesman added.
While the centre of Naples has now been cleared, streets in the suburbs are reportedly still littered with garbage piles because landfills and incinerators in the Campania region cannot cope.
Before the latest agreement was reached, Italy had already completed a deal with the eastern German state of Saxony to dispose of 30,000 tons of garbage by May 20.
Last month the BDE organization representing German disposal companies established a task force to determine where there were incinerators with sufficient capacity to treat Italian waste.
In January, the north German port city of Bremerhaven announced it had agreed to dispose of 30,000 tons of garbage from Naples by the end of June.
3. Paper or Plastic? Either Bag Would Cost You 20 Cents Extra Under Nickels' Plan
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2004322352_webbags02m.html
By Sharon Pian Chan
Seattle Times staff reporter
Customers would be charged a 20-cent "green fee" per bag used at the checkout line. If approved by the City Council, the fee would take effect Jan. 1.
"The answer to the question 'Paper or plastic?' should be 'Neither,' " Nickels said at a news conference Wednesday morning. "Both harm the environment. Every piece of plastic ever made is still with us in the environment, and the best way to handle waste is not to create it in the first place."
Nickels said he wants to encourage shoppers to use reusable bags. The city plans to distribute one free bag to every household before the fee would go into effect.
City Council President Richard Conlin, chairman of the utilities committee, and Councilmembers Tim Burgess and Sally Clark support the mayor's proposal.
"It's about the use of scarce resources, about pollution of our environment, about litter in our streets and parks, and the costs, both economically and environmentally," Conlin said at the news conference.
Retailers would keep five cents of the fee to cover the cost of implementing the fee.
Small businesses that gross less than $1 million a year would be able to keep the entire 20-cent fee. The fee does not apply to smaller bags, such as those used in the produce section of many grocery stores.
The mayor also proposed banning plastic-foam food containers, which would affect restaurants, delis, fast-food outlets and coffee shops. If approved by the City Council, the ban would take effect in two stages in 2009 and 2010.
Nickels said Seattle residents go through 360 million disposable bags a year, or 600 bags per person, and 75 percent come from grocery, convenience and drug stores.
The two proposals are part of the city's "zero-waste" strategy to increase recycling and reduce trash.
San Francisco has banned plastic grocery bags.
Nickels said the Seattle proposal is modeled on one in Ireland that has reduced disposable bags by 90 percent.
Seattle Public Utilities would collect the bag fee from stores. The utility estimates it would bring in $10 million per year. About $2 million would be used to provide and promote reusable bags. The rest would be spent on waste prevention, recycling and environmental education programs.
4. Green Scotland 'can power whole of UK'
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/scotland/Green-Scotland-39can-power-whole.3942304.jp
2 April 2008
SCOTLAND could become the global leader in the fight against climate change by producing ten times as much electricity from renewables as the country needs, Alex Salmond claimed last night.
The First Minister said he wanted Scotland to become a "global advocate" for renewable energy and suggested there was so much potential in this sector that the country could not only become self-sufficient but could also produce enough electricity for the whole of Britain.
Mr Salmond was addressing the National Geographic Society in Washington, the last of three set-piece speeches he has delivered during the promotional Scotland Week events.
The First Minister said: "Scotland has an incredible potential in renewable energy generation. In total, we have the potential to generate as much as 60GW from across the sector – ten times our peak electricity demand.
"We are a small nation but we have no need to think small.
"On renewables, we will think big – reaching out beyond our borders, sharing ideas, expertise and commercial know-how."
Mr Salmond said he wanted Scotland to take on two roles – leading the arguments for renewables and pushing the boundaries of innovation.
To emphasise this point, he announced that the Scottish Government would put up £10 million to fund the world's biggest single prize for innovation in marine energy.
The First Minister said that the Saltire Prize would be awarded to a company developing the best way of translating wave or tidal power into electricity – providing the design was demonstrated in Scotland.
The criteria for the prize will now be worked out by an expert committee, the first members of which will be Terry Garcia, head of global missions at National Geographic, and Professor Anne Glover, Scotland's chief scientific adviser.
There have been other prize funds connected to global warming. Sir Richard Branson has launched the Virgin Earth Challenge for the first person or organisation to come up with a way of "scrubbing" greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, while the US Congress has created the H Prize on hydrogen technology, and the X Prize Foundation launched a new prize to explore fuel efficiency.
However, this is the first time that an award of this magnitude has been offered for marine renewables.
The First Minister said: "The Saltire Prize is the Scottish Government's way of playing its part in inspiring a revolution in clean, green energy as the world enters a new golden age in innovation prizes."
He added: "Our Saltire Prize is a call to action to scientists around the world to help bring the power of the seas around Scotland – and indeed the United States – online that much sooner."
Patrick Harvie, a Green MSP, said last night that Mr Salmond was right about the potential of renewable energy, but it needed someone more committed to green issues to deliver the strategy that was necessary to achieve results.
He added: "If you wanted someone to talk a good game about the potential while existing technologies are finding it difficult to get planning approval, then Alex Salmond would be the man."
5. Music File Compressed 1,000 Times Smaller Than Mp3
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080401150755.htm
ScienceDaily
(Apr. 2, 2008)
Researchers at the University of Rochester have digitally reproduced music in a file nearly 1,000 times smaller than a regular MP3 file. The music, a 20-second clarinet solo, is encoded in less than a single kilobyte, and is made possible by two innovations: recreating in a computer both the real-world physics of a clarinet and the physics of a clarinet player.
The achievement, announced April 1 at the International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing held in Las Vegas, is not yet a flawless reproduction of an original performance, but the researchers say it's getting close.
"This is essentially a human-scale system of reproducing music," says Mark Bocko, professor of electrical and computer engineering and co-creator of the technology. "Humans can manipulate their tongue, breath, and fingers only so fast, so in theory we shouldn't really have to measure the music many thousands of times a second like we do on a CD. As a result, I think we may have found the absolute least amount of data needed to reproduce a piece of music."
In replaying the music, a computer literally reproduces the original performance based on everything it knows about clarinets and clarinet playing. Two of Bocko's doctoral students, Xiaoxiao Dong and Mark Sterling, worked with Bocko to measure every aspect of a clarinet that affects its sound—from the backpressure in the mouthpiece for every different fingering, to the way sound radiates from the instrument. They then built a computer model of the clarinet, and the result is a virtual instrument built entirely from the real-world acoustical measurements.
The team then set about creating a virtual player for the virtual clarinet. They modeled how a clarinet player interacts with the instrument including the fingerings, the force of breath, and the pressure of the player's lips to determine how they would affect the response of the virtual clarinet. Then, says Bocko, it's a matter of letting the computer "listen" to a real clarinet performance to infer and record the various actions required to create a specific sound. The original sound is then reproduced by feeding the record of the player's actions back into the computer model.
At present the results are a very close, though not yet a perfect, representation of the original sound.
"We are still working on including 'tonguing,' or how the player strikes the reed with the tongue to start notes in staccato passages," says Bocko. "But in music with more sustained and connected notes the method works quite well and it's difficult to tell the synthesized sound from the original."
As the method is refined the researchers imagine that it may give computer musicians more intuitive ways to create expressive music by including the actions of a virtual musician in computer synthesizers. And although the human vocal tract is highly complex, Bocko says the method may in principle be extended to vocals as well.
The current method handles only a single instrument at a time, however in other work in the University's Music Research Lab with post-doctoral researcher Gordana Velikic and Dave Headlam, professor of music theory at the University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music, the team has produced a method of separating multiple instruments in a mix so the two methods can be combined to produce a very compact recording.
Bocko believes that the quality will continue to improve as the acoustic measurements and the resulting synthesis algorithms become more accurate, and he says this process may represent the maximum possible data compression of music.
"Maybe the future of music recording lies in reproducing performers and not recording them," says Bocko.
This research is funded by the National Science Foundation.
Sound files
Human performance recorded using MP3 format http://www.rochester.edu/news/audio/sound2_160mp3.wav
Virtual performance using Bocko's new compression http://www.rochester.edu/news/audio/sound4.wav
Adapted from materials provided by University of Rochester.
Honorable Mention:
1. 5th - Grader Finds Mistake at Smithsonian
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-ODD-Smarter-Than-Smithsonian.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: April 2, 2008
Filed at 6:32 p.m. ET
ALLEGAN, Mich. (AP) -- Is fifth-grader Kenton Stufflebeam smarter than the Smithsonian? The 11-year-old boy, who lives in Allegan but attends Alamo Elementary School near Kalamazoo, went with his family during winter break to the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington.
Since it opened in 1981, millions of people have paraded past the museum's Tower of Time, a display involving prehistoric time. Not one visitor had reported anything amiss with the exhibit until Kenton noticed that a notation, in bold lettering, identified the Precambrian as an era.
Kenton knew that was wrong. His fifth-grade teacher, John Chapman, had nearly made the same mistake in a classroom earth-science lesson before catching himself.
''I knew Mr. Chapman wouldn't tell all these students'' bad information, the boy told the Kalamazoo Gazette for a story published Wednesday.
So Kevin Stufflebeam took his son to the museum's information desk to report Kenton's concern on a comment form. Last week, the boy received a letter from the museum acknowledging that his observation was ''spot on.''
''The Precambrian is a dimensionless unit of time, which embraces all the time between the origin of Earth and the beginning of the Cambrian Period of geologic time,'' the letter says.
The solution to the problem would not involve advanced science but rather simply painting over the word ''era,'' the note says.
''We did forward a copy of the comment and our paleobiology department's response to the head of the exhibits department,'' said Lorraine Ramsdell, educational technician for the museum.
While no previous visitors to the museum had brought up the error, it has long rankled the paleobiology department's staff, who noticed it even before the Tower of Time was erected 27 years ago, she said.
''The question is, why was it put up with that on it in the first place?'' Ramsdell said.
Excited as he was to receive the correspondence from museum officials, he couldn't help but point out that it was addressed to Kenton Slufflebeam.
In Allegany.
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